<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://mobilitysite.com/2008/08/is-the-iphone-now-more-unstable-than-windows-mobile/' target='_blank'>http://mobilitysite.com/2008/08/is-...windows-mobile/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"...Dare I say, Windows Mobile is not Unstable, it&rsquo;s the applications we flood the devices with. Bashing Microsoft for other developer&rsquo;s applications is something that has just become the 'cool thing to do', I guess. Windows Mobile is not perfect, but it&rsquo;s not the beast many want us to believe. Apple has 3rd party applications now. Nice right? Well, iPhone owners are complaining of lockups and having to reset. It could never be Apple&rsquo;s fault though, it&rsquo;s got to be the applications. Bad developers, bad apps, it could never be Apple&rsquo;s fault. So here we are, Apple iPhone locks up&hellip; Bad App. Windows Mobile Phone locks up, Bad Microsoft. Hmmm&hellip; Ok. Let&rsquo;s talk about the iPhone shall we?"</em><br /><br />I had a little internal battle with myself before releasing this. On one hand I am incredibly sick and tired of the constant barrage of articles comparing the iPhone to Windows Mobile. At the end of the day their differences and user experiences are so unique that it is pretty much useless to try and draw comparisons. These devices were designed from the ground up for completely different customer bases mean Windows Mobile will always be superior to the iPhone when it comes to the business side of things and the iPhone will always outshine Windows Mobile when it comes to user interface. <br /><br />Chris from Mobility Site does bring up an interesting point though. With the release of the new iPhone and application store there appears to be larger than average complaints from users about device lockups, hard resets, bricking from other the air application updates, and even the <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/earlysound/2756750007/" target="_blank">camera distorting images</a> - it looks as if Apple's little device that could is starting to experience some big boy growing pains like all the other mobile smartphone operating systems. So what do you guys think, are these all just isolated incidents or are any of you iPhone users experiencing any of these issues?</p>

I'm a WinMo developer and constant basher of it. I bash it because, well, it sucks in some important ways. The user experience sucks. The performance sucks. The developer experience is so-so. If that sucked, I wouldn't develop for it. I want to love WinMo, but I just can't. The people at Microsoft who truly did their job are the marketers and bizdev folks.

And the base OS developers. One thing I can say about WinMo is that it's actually very solid against crashes and hangs. Though I can write some pretty good code, I also write some pretty awful code. Said code simply results in the application dying, but the OS still alive and kicking. I've had many debugging sessions where I would have unreleased resources, writing into random memory location, stack pointer corruptions, you name it. And I have had so few cases where I even had to soft reboot - it happens from time to time, but only in my most crack-smoking-code situations.

My friends who have the iPhone and have begun downloading apps have all complained that they had to hard reset their device several times. That doesn't sound very solid to me.

I'm still going to write apps for the iPhone, but I have to give Microsoft props on creating a very solid core OS. Now if they can just make the UI and the SDK suck much less, I'll be a huge WinMo fan again.

When I had the Moto Q, I probably reset it (or it reset itself) two to three times a week. With the iPhone 3G, it probably resets itself once a week. So, in my experience, the iPhone OS isn't nearly as buggy as WinMo. The BlackBerry Curve, however, had both of them beat; the Curve was practically invincible. I don't think I needed to reset the Curve once in the three months I had it. Ultimately, what I've found is that the most important thing is the user experience. That doesn't mean what crashes the least; it means what works the best. In that regard, I give my vote to the iPhone.

I have an iPod Touch and it used to be the most stable device/ipod I have ever used.

Come firmware 2.0 and I click the buy button. After that, I have had nothing but trouble. It's unstable, there are times when I had to hard reset it not once, but 4 times consecutively. And its not jailbroken.

I have installed about 10-15 apps on it and it just feels so sluggish. Not like the old 1.1.4 firmware that ran smooth as butter.

If I had this experience on a phone, it would be horrible to use it on a day to day basis.

Anyway, I have been using WM phones since a few years and have seen them progress. WM is very stable out of the box. My mom uses my old WM phone and she doesn't know even 5% of the features, nor uses them. But its the most stable phone she's ever used and she absolutely loves it.

My earlier WM phone had over 80 apps installed and it was very stable. As long as you don't install random junk from strangers, there are little chances of it crashing.

Now I use a Nokia E71 (on the newest Symbian 9.2). It's very stable as well, as stable as my WM phone.

I love the iPod Touch (iPhone) interface. It feels slick and easy to use. It's intuitive and brilliant. But I am sick of people talking about it like its the holy grail or that its super stable.
Whatever it is, surely the word stable does not describe it.

I have been using PocketPC/Win Mo for years and still have a Q, and do not use it for anything more than texting and typing notes in the built in crappy checklist program. I just got tired of the instability and what I perceive horrible usability.

I got the Touch and it was rock solid stable and I think light years ahead in terms of usability. Now with the 2.0 release I have had several free applications crash and sometimes when launching one it makes my Touch reboot. Still no where as bad as my PPC/WinMO experience.

As far as stability goes, I have only had to hard reset my device once due to a weird system failure, that I was not the cause, in all my years of using the operating system. I have however owned a few problem phones like the Cingular 3125 and the Motorola MPx220 that would suffer due to hardware problems/malfunctions and there has been a few time when installing a 3rd party application kicked my phones face in 8 ways from Sunday. Both of these problems however weren't due to the stability of the operating system but due to the stability of the hardware or the programing of the 3rd party application that caused the error.

Stuff like this happens though when you have programs and hardware developed by 3rd parties. You can't expect every developer to put in the same time and care into testing an application as you would expect Apple or Microsoft to do (key word, expect ). I'm sure there would still be problems even if Microsoft took more aggressive control over Windows Mobile and started developing their own devices, but there would hopefully be a lot fewer and more far between.

The iPhone 3G is my first iPhone. Since day 1 it has been very unstable. Recently I even did a full restore and only installed a few apps. The instability I experience appears to have nothing to do with the 3rd party apps.
I can reset the device, use it, never once launch a 3rd party app, and still have instability.

Only once every few days does the iPhone spontaneously reset. Most of the time it's just the web browser crashing on me, and it crashes very frequently (at least once every 5 minutes of use.) I almost threw it against the wall the other day when I was posting to a forum and the browser just closed (crashed) and lost all of my text entry. It did that 4 times that evening. I swear I give up trying to do forum posts from it, I'm always afraid it's going to crash on me at the wrong time.

So I've taken to forcing a reset every morning when I pull it off the charger. Usually at once sometime through the day. Any time I expect to use it for more than 5 minutes at a time, I'll reset it. Resetting it seems to make it more stable for the subsequent session.

I haven't had to do this kind of reset management since the Treo 600!

I have never experienced this kind of instability with WM (3 devices over 3 years of WM5/6.) In fact the Treo 750 could go for weeks without a reset.

I never understood what people talked about when they said that WM is buggy and/or unstable. Maybe coming from the rather unstable PalmOS, WM felt extremely stable.
Heck, even the blackberry crashed and rebooted (as rarely) as it ever happened to me on WM. (I had a BB for work for a year in a half in addition to my personal WM devices.)

I really HOPE Apple gets a handle on these stability problems. Now that WebKit seems to be coming to WM pretty soon, I'll have a hard time justifying any reason to stick with PalmOS.
I still have my Tilt and Treo 750, so it's no big deal to just put away the iPhone and go back.

That makes me laugh, because Jobs was all about preventing this from happening (and he obviously failed miserably). I wish I could find his quote about not bringing down the west coast cellphone network.

Come firmware 2.0 and I click the buy button. After that, I have had nothing but trouble. It's unstable, there are times when I had to hard reset it not once, but 4 times consecutively. And its not jailbroken.

The 2.0.1 update fixed some, but not all issues. I still recommend updating to that, if you haven't already.

Back to the original question, I don't think it can be answered with a simple "yes" or "no" answer. It only takes one poorly-written and poorly-tested app to wreak havoc. The WM device I'm using now can't stop grinding to a halt, thanks to a handful of apps bundled with the device. It needs a couple of soft resets just to make it through the day.

Uhm, when I said 2.0, I meant 2.01 I actually never wanted to buy the 2.0 upgrade, as I heard lots of reports about its instability. 2.01 was reported to have fixed a lot of the problems, but apparently for me, it still feels slower/sluggish if not outrightly crashing.

The only time WM has ever crashed on me is when I was using a custom rom.

Otherwise, its uptime is great. And I install a lot of stuff, with my today screen filled with spb diary, batterystatus, spb pocket plus, etc.